the digital neighborhood
Winifred Gallagher (2007) reminded us that the notion of home as we understand it in the West is a fairly recent development; typically, home meant not only the place where you had meals and slept, “but your whole social mileau, such as your village” (p. 15). Social media such as yelp, last.fm and outside.in attempt to evoke this more traditional understanding of home and community even as they promote a modern and digital one. As a noun, the word neighbor derives from the West Germanic words n hwiz, "near," and b ram, "dweller, especially a farmer” (“Neighbor”, 2003). Thus, a neighbor was a near dweller. The modern English definition of neighbor still retains the idea of proximity: “who lives near or next to another” (“Neighbor”). Historically, then, neighbors are created from having location in common. As a concept, neighborhood connotes group connection, similarity and distinction.
When I think of a neighborhood I think of a specific area, distinct in some way from its surroundings, such as the types of homes or buildings between streets or the architecture of an area. Typically, houses or buildings are close to another, within walking or bike-riding distance. In suburbs and small towns, the areas are typically separated from major thoroughfares, though in urban areas this isn’t necessarily the case. Neighborhoods are created out of a physical space, out of proximity, and from them a complex and rich system of community, connections, relationships and expectations emerge. As Stephen Doheny-Farina (1998) wrote in The Wired Neighborhood, “A community is not something you can easily join…It must be lived. It is entwined, contradictory, and involves all our senses. It involves the ‘continuing, unplanned interactions between the same people for a long period of time’ ” (p. 37). Put simply: neighborhoods are not only about the houses, streets, and businesses that create boundaries but also about the people who live within them and the identities they form together as a social group.
The concept of the neighborhood gives users a sense of place, of belonging, but it also motivates users to connect to others and to contribute to social media in significant ways. Social media sites not only encourage users to participate through building a digital community and contributing to social media by generating content for the site, but they also rely on participation for their success. In Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Clay Shirky (2008a) explained that “the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct […]” and with the explosion of social media, participating in groups has become, as Shirky quoted social scientist Seb Paquet, “ridiculously easy” (p. 54).
As an increasingly mobile society, our social lives have moved from geophysical neighborhoods to digital ones, bringing with us the nostalgia of “near dwellers ” as community where people share common values and expectation. In his essay, “The Age of Social Transformation,” Peter Drucker (1994) wrote, “People no longer have roots. People no longer have a neighborhood that controls what their home is like, what they do, and, indeed what their problems are allowed to be” (p 74). While Drucker implied the old community has been dead for some time, Doheny-Farina and Clay Shirky remind us that the need for identifying through community ties remains. In the place of the traditional neighborhood communities, social connections via the Internet have developed, many through social media.
If you imagine the Internet as a cityscape, as David Crystal (2001) has suggested, “with its suggestion of unlimited opportunities and myriad dangers,” then social media are its neighborhoods, its boroughs, its coffee shops and diners: its gathering places where you run into old friends and make new ones (p. 62). In/on/through social media, identity is defined through relationships, collaboration, and participation. Therefore, using neighborhood as a metaphor conveys the kind of comfort and intimacy necessary for users to create relationships, to participate in and share themselves with digital communities. As a metaphor, neighborhood evokes community, familiarity, shared space, and often an assumption of shared values. Due to how easily and quickly groups emerge and dissolve via the Internet, as well as our increasingly mobile society, we have made the concept of neighborhood into an icon, a holder of shared values. In doing so, a sense of nostalgia regarding neighborhoods emerges as we yearn for a place to connect with those who have something in common with us. Place easily becomes the focus of this yearning.
May